Welcome to Polimi's "Technical Environmental Systems" course. Before attending the first session of the course you should fill the following survey in which you will inform us about your contact information, academic background, and software skills.
In this survey you will be asked to create an account on the following websites and insert the corresponding account informatio:
In case you do not have a DropBox account, You should crate a free account here and indicate the corresponding email address in the first section of the survey
In case you do not have an account on Github, please create one here, for your username please use a human readable format (e.g. MRossi, RossiMarco, Rossi_Marco and not M007R92 !
Please create and account on the NREL's Building Component Library https://bcl.nrel.gov/ (username format: the same as a github account) Once you create an account, in your dashboard you will find an API key. Please save that number so that you can have easy access to it.
In this course, we will use EnergyPlus, Sketchup and OpenStudio which should be downloaded and installed. You can also download the files (For windows - 64bit) from the following DropBox link.
- Important Note: Pay attention that the softwares should be installed in the same order as given below:
- EnergyPlus
- SketchUp
- OpenStudio
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It is noteworthy that, in case you already have the SketchUp software installed on your computer, you might have to re-install it as the OpenStudio version might not be compatible with your installed version of SketchUp.
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In order to check whether you have correctly installed the above-mentioned softwares, you should verify that you have the OpenStudio add-on added to your SketchUp tools.
In case you are using another operating system (e.g. Linux, MacOs, Windows 32bits), you can download them from the following links:
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EnergyPlus: In this Link you can download the suitable version of the software based on your operating System
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SketchUp: You can find the suitable installation file (SketchUp Make 2016) for your operating system from this Link, Pay attention that we are going to use SketchUp Make and not SketchUp Pro which is a commercial software.
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OpenStudio: The installation files of OpenStudio for different operating system can be found here.
In this project, geometry of a commercial building should be first introduced in SketchUp and the other characteristics of the building should be then defined employing OpenStudio. The latter software should next be used to calculate the yearly heating and cooling consumption of the building for a base case. Next, a parametric study, should be conducted in order to investigate the effect of changing the position and wall characteristics on the building’s yearly energy consumption. Accordingly, the simulation should be performed for three different cities and three different walls, and the corresponding obtained yearly consumptions should be compared with the ones of the base case.
Pay attention that you should conduct the sensitivity analysis on the walls just for one city
You can send the information about the members of your group via this link till 11/12/2019, you will be assigned a time-slot
The final written examination will include exercises and theoretical questions. The exercises will be similar to and on the same topics as the ones which were solved in the class. The theoretical questions instead will only be posed from the topics in the context of which no exercise was solved (including "solar radiation", "heat transfer through windows", "Heat gain, infiltration, and ventilation", "centralized HVAC system", and "solar thermal systems"). In the theoretical questions, the students are not required to write down the corresponding formulas and should instead be able to explain the concepts through explanation or schematic representation if needed.
The students are only required to remember the formulas related heat transfer through walls (through conduction and convection heat transfer in series or parallel conditions) and simplified heat transfer through wall calculations. Other formulas will be given in the exam paper; thus, the students are not allowed to bring any formula paper. The RLF and weather data tables along with the psychometric chart (if needed) will also be provided in the exam and the student should not bring them.
The students should clearly remember to bring a simple calculator